Agility Presenter shines

Check out this multimedia presentation that’s part of our Buyer’s Guide package on collaborative workspaces. You’ll need Internet Explorer and Windows Media player to view it.

How’d we put it together? If you couldn’t tell from the branding around the margins, Anystream’s Agility Presenter helped capture our presenter (Brett Trusko) and the PowerPoint slides and combine all the parts into the package you see. I didn’t get to see the actual recording of the presentation, but given that it was turned around in about 24 hours, I am guessing the software was pretty easy to use. Trusko used version 1.0 of Agility Presenter, then shipped the resulting files to the folks at Anystream. They in turn used a beta version of their 1.1 product to “re-skin” the original presentation to include the Network World logo and color scheme. They also created a version of the presentation for viewers with older versions of Windows Media player.

The resulting output is much like that of Microsoft Producer with seemingly hundreds of files that need to be uploaded, which can be a pain when doing it manually with FTP, like I was. We also had to split of the actual Windows Media files, since they’re served from our streaming provider, while the rest of the content is delivered from the Fusion server farm. But unlike Producer, Agility Presenter seems to output filename-friendly files (i.e. no weird characters and spaces that can screw up on a Unix box.) And, all I needed to change were a couple lines in three files to point to the Windows Media files on our service provider rather than to the local directory on Fusion where the rest of the presentation was stored. I’d have to say the worst part of the experience on my end was waiting for all the files, especially the beefy Windows Media video files, to upload on my relatively slow DSL line. Had I been in the office, which as T-1 connections to our server farm and the Internet, I suspect the process may have been a bit speedier. There’s also an upload tool included with the product that makes it easier to transfer files to supported server types (Windows).

Agility Presenter is priced at $149 and is great tool if you need to create archived presentations. If you $149 doesn’t fit your budget, give Producer a try first.